cally aware people would notice that more or less everybody catches
some disease at some point, that not all operations are always successful,
and that in the long term we all will die. Failing to appreciate these con-
tingencies, people resort to magical explanations for events that are in
fact perfectly ordinary. This is what we generally mean by "supersti-
tion." People see patterns and causes where there is just chance.
However, anthropologists know that people the world over are in
fact rather good at detecting statistical regularities in their environ-
ment. Indeed, even the simplest techniques depend on such detection
and this has been the case for as long as humans have been around.
[196] Early humans could not successfully maintain a rich food supply as
foragers unless they could detect which fruit and tubers could be
found where, with what frequency, in what season. People cannot hunt
animals without detecting which habits and behavior are true of a
species as a whole and which apply only to particular exemplars, and
so on. So it seems difficult to maintain that contingencies and random
events are not generally understood.
Furthermore, people who attribute magical and supernatural
causes to events are in general well aware of the immediate mechanical
or biological causes of these events. I mentioned in Chapter 1 the inci-
dent of the collapsed roof and the debate between Evans-Pritchard
and his Zande interlocutors. For the anthropologist, the house caved
in because of the termites. For the Zande, it was quite clear that witch-
craft was involved. However, the Zande were also aware that the ter-
mites were the proximate cause of the incident. But what they wanted
to know was why it happened at that particular time, when particular
people were gathered in the house.
In much the same way, many Fang are perfectly prepared to enter-
tain both a biological explanation and a witchcraft interpretation of ill-
nesses. Sure, so-and-so died of tuberculosis because the disease made
his lungs nonfunctional. But then, why him? Why then? When people
find supernatural causes, it is notbecause they have ignored the work
of mechanical and biological causes but because they are asking ques-
tions that go beyondthese causes.
CAUSES AND REASONS OF MISFORTUNE
This leads us to a second explanation for the fact that people explain
so many events in terms of supernatural causes. The idea is this:RELIGION EXPLAINED